1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an RFID-tag fabricating apparatus arranged to write information on or read information from radio or wireless tags (RFID tags) on and from which information can be read or written by radio communication, and a cartridge removably mounted on the RFID-tag fabricating apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) system wherein a reader or interrogator is operable in a non-contact fashion to read information from small-sized RFID tags or transponders which store desired information. This RFID system permits the information stored in the RFID tags, to be read by the reader by radio communication even where the RFID tags are stained or located at invisible positions. For this reason, the use of the RFID system is expected in various fields such as commodity administration and inspection.
Generally, each RFID tag is provided with a printed indicium or representation such as a combination of characters or a bar code, which visually indicates the kind of the tag. The conventional RFID tags are dimensioned without a special consideration of formation of the printed indicium, so that there is a limitation in the size of the area in which the combination of characters, bar code or any other printed indicium is formed. Where a relatively large number of characters are printed on the RFID tag, the maximum size of each character is limited, with a result of undesirable difficulty of visual inspection of the printed characters. During an extensive and continual research by the present inventors in an effort to solve this problem, the inventors paid attention to techniques to form RFID tag circuits on a printed label having a desired printed indicium. Patent Document 1 discloses an example of such techniques applied to fabricate identification labels.
Patent Document 1: JP-2001-513716 A (WO98/39734)
However, the conventional techniques indicated above do not take into account a relationship between the dimensions of the RFID tags and those of the printed indicia formed on the printed labels. Therefore, the conventional techniques do not solve the problem. Thus, there is not available any technique by which the dimensions of the RFID tags can be changed depending upon the dimensions of the printed indicium to be formed on each RFID tag.